WASHINGTON – The jailing and grilling of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay is costing $357,000 per day with no end in sight, according to the latest Pentagon budget figures.

The Defense Department still has no long-term plans for the 564 Gitmo prisoners being held there, except to keep interrogating them, a spokesman said.

An estimated $75 million has been earmarked from President Bush’s emergency war budget request to cover the cost of transporting, feeding, sheltering and giving medical care to the war prisoners. The budget covers projected costs through October.

Officers at Gitmo say they still don’t know whether the detainees ultimately will be sent home, held throughout the terror war as “enemy combatants,” put on trial in a military tribunal, or charged in U.S. criminal courts.

“That’s a decision for Washington,” said Lt. Col. Bill Costello, spokesman at Southern Command in Miami.

U.S. officials describe the interrogations of the Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners as fruitful but slow going.

“This is a very deliberate and slow process which is producing results,” said Lt. Col. Dennis Fink at Guantanamo.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said last week that one Guantanamo detainee, who had been captured in Afghanistan, “started talking to us, and as a result, we caught three really bad Saudis, including one of the worst of them in Morocco.”

Pentagon figures show the $75 million slice from Bush’s war budget is being chewed up by $50 million for processing and transporting the detainees (under extraordinary security from Afghanistan through Turkey to Cuba) and maintaining them; $20 million for interrogating them; and $5 million for establishing a deployable medical unit on the Caribbean island base.

In addition to the $75 million, the Defense Department just built an indoor 612-cell prison for the detainees that cost $23 million, as well as a support facility for military personnel and guards that cost $10 million, Costello said.